19e. The Final Week: Thursday

I took advantage of the 6:45am wake-up knock (I was obliged to get up and open the door even though my first exam, the written one, wouldn’t be starting until 10am) and I phoned for a tow truck. After I had my breakfast, it arrived.

“Do you have the keys?” He came from just down the road and, like most people here, he could speak French. Lucky for me, as I didn’t want to risk getting an official warning so close to the end of the program.

He hopped in the car, turned the key, and the engine sprang to life.

Now why wouldn’t it do that for me before? Maybe something was wet. We had had a lot of heavy rain last week when I tried it and it wasn’t working. I had hopped in this morning too to check it one last time, and nothing happened.

I told the driver that I’d drive to a garage myself, but in the end I stopped at the intended garage (in nearby Little Brook) merely to put air in my tires. Like in Weymouth, the start button on the air machine didn’t do anything. The clerk, though, explained to me that the air hose here was connected directly to the compressor. It may have been the same situation in Weymouth. The clerk there really should have been able to explain it to me, though.

Today we played in the Softball Finals against Baronnie. It was a very, very nice day for it.

I had four plate appearances:

1st: Reached first on error. Advanced to second on a hit. Forced out at third on a grounder (I had to run – there was already someone on first).2nd: Got a base on balls and the rest went the same way.3rd: I would have reached first but I’d thrown the bat – I let it go at the end of an awkward, wild swing and it careened into the opposing bench. Boy, did I ever feel like a goat.4th : It was our final out of the game. I got a base on balls (I suspect our program director threw the final two balls in a half-hearted fashion out of sympathy), advanced to second on a hit, but then was left stranded on base as the game ended 15-10.

I failed to score and for this game my on-base percentage was a respectable .750 but my batting average was .000! We’ll see if the term “Matheson Line” enters the general parlance here. Probably not.

There was no limit to points each inning – theoretically, we could have won the game outright in that half-inning. All things considered, giving up 15 runs under those conditions isn’t so bad when the score could have been n ℕ, n ≥ 1 to 0.

Apropos of nothing, I’ve noticed several sheets of paper hung here and there around this residence, each entitled “List of things we don’t like about this room / residence”. I’m pretty sure that if I worked here, I wouldn’t find that very polite. A list of “issues” I could live with, but a list of “things we don’t like” is a bit too emotive for my tastes.

And another random thought – I think if you don’t know possessive pronouns (the French equivalents of ‘mine,’ ‘yours’, ‘his/hers/its*’, ‘ours’, ‘yours’ (2nd person, plural subject), and ‘theirs’), I don’t think you have any business being in Intermediate 3! ;-p (Apologies to any Intermediates 3 who might read this.) No wonder their professor said something like « WTF? Why are there so many of you here who don’t really speak French? »

Also, although this particular student was a good friend, she resorted to speaking English an awful lot – practically every time a facilitator wasn’t around and she wanted to explain something the least little bit complex. Also as a whole this residence is much more badly behaved than my residence of my last time here. It seems like some people just can’t be bothered to circumlocute, search a word, or gest. It really gets on my nerves because it’s the kind of rule-breaking that puts other people at risk of getting in shit. If a facilitator stumbles upon someone whispering to me in a language other than French, both of us get the official warning.

* - Identical in French in that the gender of the person in question does not matter. However, the genre of the object and its number do matter, so there are consequently four different ways to say ‘his’ or ‘hers’: le sien, les siens, la sienne, and les siennes. Aside: Someday, somewhere, somebody will pick up a battery and ask “Whose battery is this?” and the response from another person, pointing to a not-quite-anthropomorphic robot, will be “It’s its.”

Happy note – we watched the Video Souvenir tonight. Fantastic work. It was a good video in 2007, but now that they have a dedicated video professional among the cadre of facilitators it’s really gone up to the next level. The editing was rushed (they promise they’ll clean it up before publishing the final DVD), but the effects were amazing. They also did it all in the form of a framed narrative – a masterful lampoon of Inception.

That being said, it’s getting expensive to bring home all these “souvenirs”! If you get the printed album, the main DVD, plus all the supplemental DVDs of the recorded events, the total comes to $70. I object in particular to the $20 cost of the main DVD – it costs very little to print a DVD-R, but on the other hand I suppose the funds go to cover the many other expenses associated with the project.

As for the printed album, it’s all in color, but I find it a little short on content – I remember the one from 2007 being thicker. Also, a lot of people didn’t buy one because it cost $20. It’s nice to have, but I think I would have liked more content, and it would be okay and sometimes even better if the better part of it were in greyscale. Lastly, the deer-in-headlights colour mugshots of everybody (the same photos that were taken for our IDs) would have been obviated if they’d printed the class photos larger and put in captions. I could have lived without the mugshots – very few of them are flattering to any extent. They can actually be painful to look at.